I agree though that Robinhood is a different story with potentially harmful consequences for unsophisticated investors looking for a safe/easy investment.
These companies are not democratizing investment, accommodation, tranportation or whatever they are rent seekers that use a combination of technology, business model and rule breaking to extract a portion of every transaction.
They explicitly position themselves as 3rd party to the transaction. While the rest of us suckers play by the rules or gasp work to change them, they realize a portion of their advantage by just ignoring them.
Yes, you are. You're trying to freeze your neighborhood in amber, which is most definitely a sign of an inefficient incumbent.
Also, let's not pretend that AirBnB is progress. It's just a third party that encourages people to start illegal hotels, to earn money for themselves at the expense of their neighbours. This is not a case of local owners having opposing interests to society at large; this is a case of a company enabling some people to parasite on the others.
The incumbents I was referring to are clearly hotels and taxis. But I think it's also important to point out that I wouldn't presume to tell you who to rent to or for what duration since you own the home and it's your property. AirBnB is merely a facilitator of that transaction.
If you don't own the property, that's different story.
Sure, but you're forgetting about another party in the transaction: everyone else. You don't have to remember about them most of the time, because unlike Uber and AirBnB, most businesses aren't dumping externalities on non-customers.
> I think it's also important to point out that I wouldn't presume to tell you who to rent to or for what duration since you own the home and it's your property. AirBnB is merely a facilitator of that transaction.
That works well if you're the only one with a property within shouting range. Most people live (and most AirBnB activity happens) in large, organized groups. In a civilized society, you're not free to do anything you like without regard to the freedoms of others.
We live in a time/place where money is reasonably readily available; You take that away and "society" makes all sorts of accommodations for "you're preventing homelessness" and "you're doing what you have to do to pay your debts". Though given rising inequality, we might be closer than we think.
And for its shareholders, so is a factory dumping heavy metals to the nearby river. And for its customers, so is a slave plantation.
You judge businesses by the treatment of all participants of an economic activity, not just the ones giving and receiving money. Uber and AirBnB are examples of companies that shit on society at large to provide better service to some small fraction of it. In a civilized world, there's no place for this, which is why it saddens me deeply that they're still around.
Unless one doesn't want to notice, that is.
EDIT: The fact that these crimes "have happened at hotels/in taxis as well" ignores the fact that they are far more likely in an environment where regulations meant to prevent or reduce them are wholesale ignored.
- Uber/AirBnB's regulatory abitrage
- assault, harassment, or illegal discrimination
but this is a complete non-sequitur. The laws that they're avoiding have nothing to do with individuals hurting other individuals. And assault, harassment, or illegal discrimination are perfectly possible in the context of a licensed hotel or taxi.
If I'm a fisherman in Florida, and I need to follow regulations for the fishing industry there, they don't have a stipulation that you can't discriminate against certain persons based on age, raced, gender, etc. when you take customers out on expeditions.
Why? Because that's covered by United States law.
Yes these things happened, and yes they are atrocious but they have nothing to do with the regulatory gray areas that these companies operated in.
With a centralized platform, people selling rides or lodging actually get recorded when they reject people, which makes it possible to pursue them for discrimination.